Shatter
by irishais
Summary: She will always be his mother. (Hallowed Ground series.)


**shatter**

_-irishais-_

Her childhood is filled with endless springtime days and laughter. She grows into a young lady, and her teenage years are hopeful, budding, beautiful. When she turns twenty, she finds love in the son of a soldier, a man who wants nothing more than to build a school. She marries him in a quiet ceremony by the sea.

_xx_

There is another woman wearing her face, she realizes.

Edea reaches up, touches smooth, unlined cheek, traces the corners of her eyes (some lines there, yes, but not enough to really be considered _old_), and smoothes back long, dark hair away from her temples.

It is her skin that she feels, her pale soft skin. It is her hair, the hair she runs a brush through a hundred times every night before bed, when she braids it over her shoulder.

They are her eyes, dark and large.

She lets her fingers drag across the mirror's surface, and her fingertips sink into it. Her reflection distorts, ripples out. It doesn't come back together.

Her hand withdraws, and it is coated in a film of liquid silver that glints and sparkles in the light. She shakes her arm, and the quicksilver is gone, flooding down into the sink in the opposite direction it should.

When she looks in the mirror, she sees herself, plain, proper Matron, with a houseful of children and a little boy with blond hair who beats his tiny fists on the door of the bathroom and asks her if he can have another cookie.

_-you can't make up your mind_

She unlocks the door, and she takes his hand.

_xx_

This is her secret:

She meets a witch on the beach when she is five, a withered corpse of a thing who touches her and whispers things into her ear, promises of all that she has ever wanted. Edea cries for her father, and when he comes running down the beach, the old woman is gone, evaporated into nothing but a dark spot that blossoms between Edea's lungs and leaves her seeing things she cannot explain.

From then on, she feels like there is a ghost watching her, lingering over her shoulder, directing her to do this, touch that, feel this, see that there? Her dreams twist, melt, boiling hot images and frozen nightmares.

By the time she is in her thirties, she burns, sometimes, in the dreams, a witch at the stake. She cannot control the magic anymore—it is starting to crack, to leak out into the world. Cid sees her levitating a tea cup without realizing it.

He names her _sorceress_. He claims he will love her just as he always has, cradling her as she weeps under this new mantle that she must bear.

_xx_

She is in a black dress. There are feathers around her face and horns upon her head, a trail of smoke and sky dust at her back.

Everything is colored in a film of fire, everywhere she looks.

When she walks, she glides, she flows, her footsteps a river of stars and dreams and everywhere is the red, red, red of hell.

Her fingers are talons, long sharp nails she does not recognize. Her hands are smooth, beautiful, ageless. She draws on a pair of black satin gloves.

She places them on a blond boy's shoulder, with a stitched-up tear between his green-glass eyes.

_-you just want to be saved from this predicament_

He sees fire and fury and _power_, endless power in her gaze. He sees his dreams, his nightmares, every last bogeyman that she's scared away with a candle and a bedtime story come back to haunt him.

The crown she wears is so, so heavy. She keeps her neck strong, her shoulders thrown back and proud. Let him fear her, as long as he follows her down into hell and glory.

The boy is boasting, proud, wavering in her face. He knows her, he thinks, he knows her very well, but he doesn't know _how_, and inside herself, Edea remembers scraped knees and kissed boo-boos and the laughter of little children.

Her reflection is distorted in his eyes. She smiles. Her lips are cruel and her words are crueler.

_-come with me to a place of no return_

She remembers—she _remembers_, she screams and beats her hands against this shell that isn't her, and she begs this boy, this beautiful boy to remember his mother, remember, _remember. _

_I'll be your knight,_ he tells her, and the witch who wears her face draws him to her.

She crosses through the veil, and he follows her. When they are in the pitch-dark solitude of nothing, she wraps her claws around his hand.

_Good boy. _

_xx_

She keeps this a secret from Cid for as long as she can, until, three months into the gestation of the only child she thinks they're ever going to have—and she cannot explain just _how_ she knows- she wakes up with the very clear sensation that something is wrong.

The best doctors in Esthar cannot explain why a woman who has never touched a draw point in her life is suffering from mag-poisoning of that magnitude.

_Time, _the ghost whispers in her ear, _it will not wait. _

She comes home with an empty womb and the blood of an innocent on her hands, and after six months of silence and shadow and brooding, Cid surprises her with a suggestion. _Adoption_ becomes their new happiness.

There is a girl of seventeen, a thin waif of a thing who has done too much growing up in too little time, who offers them her son in exchange for a thousand gil. She disappears after the boy is born. Cid's check gets cashed somewhere north of Timber.

Edea is hard-pressed to remember her first name, but they keep her last as a token of a memory.

The child lives, just barely, a tiny pale-haired boy who breathes through a tube for three days after he is born. The name she gives him means victorious peace; she hopes it brings him strength.

She brings him home on a gleaming bright December morning.

_xx_

Edea sees him only once, afterward, proud back bowed as he slumps in a chair in front of a panel of Garden admirals.

Her husband touches her hand. She looks at Cid, this poor, sad man who brings her tea and says he loves her, who shows her picture albums from a wedding she only remembers in flashes.

She shouldn't be in this room. It closes in on her, suffocating her, scratching at her skin like a mantle of feathers and a crown of thorns upon her head. She should be in _his _spot, taking _his _sentence, her head upon the chopping block. She is his _mother_.

She looks at the bent head of her shattered son, and realizes that she cannot feel a thing.

_-bid farewell to your childhood_

There is another woman wearing her face, and it wears her mask so very well, because when her husband takes her hand in between his own, she feels her lips curve up into a gentle smile she does not believe.

Her son looks back at them, just once, as he is led out of the room in handcuffs. His expression is unreadable.


End file.
